“Jenny?!? C’est un bon nom Francophone!”

Saturday night, we got dinner with two friends, who’d taken the liberty of buying us tickets to the very entertaining Kiss My Cabaret for afterward. KMC turns out to be a lot funnier than the old performance art revue Balls that we attended several times long ago when we lived in Minneapolis. I remember Balls as occasionally brilliant and as taking itself very seriously. KMC was more, well, raucous. Of course it was bilingual and I got lost a few times, but when the two Catholic ladies described the priest’s sex ed class for boys, I got the idea.

More Montrealization

Yesterday after work and before approximately 7.5 consecutive hours of very enjoyable (and necessary) socializing, I went over to Cheap Thrills, which is right near McGill. I can’t believe I’ve been working there a year and only now gotten there. I’ve been sorely in need of a record store to call my own, and I can tell this place will do just fine. I ran off a list of Canadian bands I liked and said “I want more interesting Canadian indy bands” and immediately got a pile of interesting indie bands. Right now, I’m listening to the Besnard Lakes, which is cool and spacey. My favo(u)rite so far is Death From Above 1979, which is one of those bands I’d been meaning to check out for a long time but never did. I admit that there’s a certain special place in my heart for bass-driven bands, but this is just good rock any way you cut it.

Also important to my well-being has been writing. This morning, I completed and mailed off my response to reviewers comments on the Sound Studies reader.(1) I’m close to finishing my revisions on a coauthored piece about sounded time in the digital age, and the Bad Subjects issue is shaping up nicely. On deck: assembling materials from mp3 book into proper order for podcasting talk.

Now, let’s see how much of the weekend I can dedicate to nonacademic stuff. . . .

1. Though I am wondering what kind of changes are afoot a Routledge after Taylor and Francis canned the Bill Germano, who is essentially responsible for making Routledge such an important outlet for cultural studies work — check out this list of authors he’s published and you’ll see what I mean. What could they possibly be thinking? For anyone who subscribes to the Chronicle of Higher Education, they have a story about it on their site.

Blog? What Blog?

Sorry to be so absent lately. September is the new February. By that I mean it is now the busiest month of the year for me, as February once was. A lot has to do with various fellowship and university deadlines, but some of it is also my fault. After all, I am inbetween the first and second of two trips to Durham.

I have much to report, a little time at the moment, but here are some highlights:

Those books I was going to read? If you like ethnographies, they’re awesome. Beautifully written and very interesting. I said this at the conference last week, and I really do believe it: we’re on the cusp of something big in music studies. A generation ago, people like Steve Feld, Simon Frith, John Shepherd, Larry Grossberg Richard Leppert, and Susan McClary (slightly later) were getting tenure and setting up their shops. Now, we’ve got a whole new set of people installed in positions where they can help shape music study from outside the establishment mentality of musicology. People at the conference were reticent about naming, but if “The New Musicology” got a name, I don’t see why a diverse group of music scholars now couldn’t also. Unfortunately, I don’t have a name. But there is some kind of ferment that is crossing ethnomusicology, anthropology (the two fields most heavily represented at the conference–I was perhaps the only person who didn’t use “ethnography” to describe how I understand my method), popular music studies, communication studies, literature, sociology, history, and several other fields. In addition to all the sound studies stuff (and perhaps that’s the topic for another blog), it seems that there’s a group of scholars now working on what I’ll call non-elite musics who are either bringing in fresh questions, or bringing fresh perspectives on questions that music studies people thought had been done to death (like authenticity, an issue I thought was dead and pointless until I read Aaron Fox’s book). All this is to say that my conference was great and very edifying. The Saturday night concert also featured the hardest rocking triangle playing I have ever seen. I am not being melodramatic.

On my way out of Durham on Sunday, I met up with my friend Jj who works part time at a music store in Chapel Hill. I wound up stopping by to “see” the store, specifically to get a demo of how you can use the control voltage on a Moogerfooger low-pass filter to control any of a number of parameters on the phaser. Which is, simply put, sweet. But while there, I happened by the instrument room and fell in love with a ukulele. Technically it’s a tenor, which makes it bigger, but I’m trying to learn a new chord a day. It’s a very modern instrument — plastic body, synthetic strings, polycarbonate neck. Wood front though. The tone is actually great. Mine looks like the green one in the picture below:

flukes

I’ve got to run now (this entry has been written in snippets all day) but the only way to get back into the posting thing is to post. To those of you whom I owe an email — sorry! I’ll write soon.

Time Flies When

you’re starting the school year. I’ve had six continuous nights of socializing (before tonight) which were absolutely outstanding, especially a labo(u)r day party which perfectly started off the school year/ended the summer. But the reality is that I’ve been having a blast every night since the fun started last Wednesday with a birthday party. Which is great because I’ve also been working like, well, I don’t know what. I have been busy at my desk composing a variety of bureaucratic documents and how-tos (not interesting enough to detail), a Bad Subjects op-ed on New Orleans that I am frankly having a lot of trouble writing (everything seems so banal), and of course yesterday I had to get together my lecture for today and prep class, which included installing Ableton Live on my laptop, which is a nice thing to have installed on one’s laptop. Today’s class was, as one student wrote, a “first class first class” and it’s really fun to have a mix of new students and people I had in classes last year. It’s like difference and repetition. Har har.

In my copious free time I am taking stock of various research projects and getting set up to unleash my RAs on them.

The Fall 2005 North American Tour begins tomorrow, with the first of two trips this month to Duke for The Word on Music, which should be really good for me, intellectually. A bunch of interesting music authors will be there, and it’s always nice to see my friends in the triangle.

I just learned of this book series. Normally, I hate journalistic rock criticism, but somehow I’m drawn to it. Maybe it’s the formalism of the enterprise. I just ordered a bunch. Will report back.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few books from the authors I’m meeting at this symposium on Friday to polish off:

Aaron Fox, Real Country
E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon and
Maureen Mahon, Right to Rock

and a couple theses to read.

I should post reading lists more often. I’ll try and make an entry from the road. It breaks my heart to miss the Thursday night NFL opener with Carrie, but there’s always next week.

The Most Canadian Thing Ever?

I arrive on campus this sunny afternoon to witness the spectacle of the first day of school. Undergraduates everywhere, corporations hawking their logos and free food, one sorry frat trying to get people to eat hot dogs. As I walk up the hill toward the Arts Building (which houses my office), I pass the giant Provigo tent, which has set out dozens of tables and chairs where new students can congregate. Everything and everyone smacks of anticipation, energy and well, cool.

And what is the soundtrack that Provigo (a grocery store chain) has chosen for this classic collegiate scene?

Rush — Limelight.

Chat Radioactif

"I'm

As the picture suggests, our cat Tetrys(1) is radioactive. He’d been having digestive problems for some time and when we took him to the vet she said all indications were that he had hyperthyroid. Hyperthyroid is a condition that eventually kills cats, and can be treated through a regimen of medicine that will deal with the symptoms but possibly have side effects. The other possibility was to give him an injection of radioactive iodine, which would be absorbed by the thyroid gland. The iodine would thereby “nuke” his thyroid and bring his levels back to normal, effectively curing the condition with no side-effects other than a hefty vet bill.

Having no children and being solvent, we automatically went for the radioactive option. Which meant that with the right scanning equipment, he probably looked something like this:

""

Not surprisingly, the Canadian government has very strict controls over the use of radioactive substances, which means that he has been classified as hazardous for the last week and had to stay at the vet’s. Though they apparently did let him out to walk around. Anyway, he’s coming home tomorrow after the all-day faculty meeting (which he will not attend). We have to treat his waste as radioactive for a week or so, which means changing the catbox twice a day, and he is strictly forbidden from sleeping on the necks of children during that time (not usually an issue). Yes, my cat is an environmental hazard. We’ll even get to see them run a Geiger counter over him before we bring him home. I feel like he’s turned into a light show or something. But it’ll be great to have him home. I didn’t realize how much my home space was defined by the interaction of two cats until one went on a week-long trip to the vet. . . .


1. Pronounced like the game “tetri” but with a “y” because we thought it looked cooler when we named him in 1992. Neither of us liked the game particularly. We just thought the name was fun to say, which is my main criterion in naming a pet.